Limmud NY is participating in American Express’s “Small Business Saturday” promotion on November 24th. If you donate $25 to Limmud NY, American Express will credit your account for the $25. You spend nothing and Limmud NY gets $25. You can do this with every American Express card you have.

It’s a very limited opportunity. You can sign up now, but you have to make your gift on Saturday, November 24th. It only requires two easy steps from you:

Step 1: Click here to register your card(s) now for Small Business Saturday with American Express. Please register now as American Express is limiting the number of participants. It will only take a couple of minutes.

Step 2: On Saturday, November 24th go to the Limmud NY website (www.limmudny.org), click on the “Donate” button, and use each registered American Express card to make a donation. This step can only be done on November 24th.*

If you would me to send you a reminder on November 24th, please send me a message here.

I’ll be honest, it’s been an intense time for Limmud NY. We’ve lost our regular offices due to Hurricane Sandy and have had to relocate for at least the next month or so. This is a great opportunity for us to have a big win. And you can help us make that happen.

It would mean the world to make and you’d make a huge difference if you share to your friends and family so they can register their cards today.  If 1,000 people make (free) gifts of $25 to Limmud NY, we’ll raise $25,000. They only way to reach that number is to spread the word. The moment you take to pass on this information will help Limmud NY tremendously.

*Donations to Limmud NY in excess of $25 are tax deductible. American Express generally issues statement credits within 5 business days after your qualifying purchase, but the $25 credit may take up to 2 billing cycles to post to your account. Corporate cards are not eligible for this promotion.

I recently spent the better part of a week training in designing and facilitating gatherings for people thanks to a micro-grant from the ROI Community, so it felt like an opportunity to apply some of that thinking towards planning my dream comic con. This is a first draft.

If it ever becomes a real thing, you’re all invited!

(No, you’re not.)

The setting: A hotel/conference center with multiple break-out spaces, ballroom-type rooms for large gatherings, solid rooms for panels, perhaps at least one room with circular seating. Also: good spots for screenings. Oh, and a bar.

Timing: At least 2.5-3 days, preferably over a weekend.

Target Population: 150-200 participants, representing a diverse range of people within the comics world/community/whatever. Ideally, this would involve equal numbers of fans, creators (indie, corporate and otherwise), editors, publishers, retailers, journalists/bloggers, and anyone else that I might have missed.

Read on for the schedule. I recommend clicking the links to methodologies, otherwise much of what I’m proposing here won’t make much sense. Assume that breaks, meals, and the ability to move freely at any time are built into the program.

Day One: Starts Mid to Late Afternoon

Opening Keynote – I’m not particularly fond of frontal speeches, but in this case I think it’s necessary in order to set the stage for the gathering. Nothing too long or boring, but rather to get the group on board with what will be taking place in the coming days.

Icebreaker (for lack of a better term) – What is needed is one big wall and whole mess of Post-It Notes in three different colors, let’s say red, yellow, and green. Each participant receives one red, three yellow, and five green. Instructions are as follows:

• Everyone writes their all-time favorite comic on the red note
• Everyone writes their three all-time favorite comics on the yellow notes
• Everyone writes their five all-time favorite comics on the green notes

Day Two

Morning: Panels & Skill Sessions – I have nothing against panels, I think they’re pretty great. I just don’t want it to be the only programming around. The only rule for the panels is that they’re talking about craft and relevant issues; promotional panels are forbidden. The other piece is “Skill Sessions”: if participants have particular skills that they want to share and teach, whether it’s scripting/writing/inking/marketing/managing/what have you, then they can propose and lead sessions of their own. I’m thinking 2-3 slots of 75-90 minute sessions.

Midday: Marketplace and Art Jam – I like those spontaneous events where artists just be all drawing crazy things upon prompting from the audience. Good times for everyone. It’s also a good time for classic vendor stuff, but in a limited capacity. Open up a ballroom space for sellers for like 2-3 hours. People have every right to want to get their buy on, it just shouldn’t be the focal point of the gathering.

Afternoon: Open Space – This is what I wrote about in my original post. At this point, the agenda is put into the hands of the participants, to host conversations about comics that they generate themselves. Throughout the experience, people are free to move in between conversations when they want. The best timing for this is at least three hours, containing two slots lasting 45 minutes long. Depending on the number of participants (150-200), there can be between 15-25 conversations taking place at any given time.

Evening: Storytelling – People in the comics world, they got stories about the comics world. I’d just like a night of people performing them for the whole crowd, that’s all. I think it would be a lot of fun.

Day Three

Morning: Samoan Circle/Fishbowl – Let’s do one panel discussion for the whole group, but in a way that anyone can participate if they like. It starts with four people sitting in an inner circle, with the rest of the participants silently sitting in a circle watching them. The facilitator starts by offering a question to the inner circle for discussion, and can bring in new questions whenever he/she likes. At any point in the conversation, if someone from the outer circle wants to join the conversation, all they need to do is “tap out” one of the people from the inner circle and take that spot. The questions for discussion could be anything about comics, the culture, and the industry. They can either be solicited from participants in advance of the gathering, or be generated during the first two days.

Alternative: World Cafe - The variation here is that it engages all participants in continuous conversation about a set of relevant questions, but it also gives everyone the ability to be jotting down notes on the tables throughout. The potential here is that if you have a lot of artists in the room, then you might end up with some really interesting stuff on the tables.

Midday/Closing: Vision Circle: This is a piece where there would need to be smaller groups, but it would essentially be a rotating series of conversations in which participants imagine what the next year will look like for comics and articulate that to their partners. So they would start by saying “It’s 2014 and it’s been an amazing year for comics…” As the event draws to a close, it’s an opportunity for participants to think positively about what they hope to see from comics in the future and to hear the different ideas that emerge from that.

The closing would simply be a debrief on the final exercise and the entire experience as a whole (gotta sharpen this final piece some more). A couple more things I’d add are little tweaks to the whole space to engage people in-between sessions. I’d ask everyone to bring a bunch of comics that they’d like to get rid of, and create a temporary Lending Library/Reading Room that is housed within the gathering. At the end of the event, people take what they want. I’d also make sure to give artists the ability to draw on the walls all over the place.

That’s what I’ve got for now. More at some point in the future. Always curious to hear people’s thoughts if anyone still reads this thing.

I’ve been going to NYCC since it started back in 2006. It’s been pretty fun for the most part. Last year, I met up with my friends and I’m pretty sure we collectively lasted an hour before heading for the door. One huge highlight was getting a signed print from Geof Darrow. Meeting him was legitimately the only time I’ve ever geeked out at meeting a comics artist, and he was a such a sweet and humble guy.

Other than that, I barely went to the con, and I didn’t have a very good time in 2010 either, especially after I nearly went insane back at SDCC that same year. Thinking back on SDCC, I barely remember feeling anything other than stressed on the con floor with a few exceptions. What I do remember is sitting at dinner the night the con ended with some new friends and each of us talked about the comics that changed our lives. That conversation was powerful and unforgettable; it felt like the kind of interaction that turned people into friends.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days thinking about what it is about cons that doesn’t work for me anymore, and considering what could look different about these gatherings. And what you should probably understand about me is that my career is based on creating engaging, large-scale gatherings for people with shared interests. And when I’m not doing that, I’m focused on facilitating meaningful conversations between people on various topics.

So I decided to apply my work brain to this question and I started thinking about the primary vehicles by which comics readers/fans are bought together to share and connect around their mutual interest: The Con (an apt double meaning, if unintentional). Comic Cons are primarily promotional and sales events. They’re less about bringing people together around shared love of comics (though it does happen, and PR probably pays lip service to it somewhere) than they are a platform for people to make money, be they comic retailers, sellers of creepy misogynistic calendars, various figurines, stickers or what have you. For 5+ years, I’ve had to spend a lot of time wading through all of that with the hopes of tracking down a friend so we can actually talk in person about liking comics.

Comic Cons are also a great way for major publishers to manipulate and promote the interests of their respective fanbases. It’s about selling, nothing more, nothing less. It seems like many or most of the panels (with obvious exceptions) are there for the goal of major publishers to justify future purchases of comics that have yet to be released. And let’s be honest: most of those comics tend not to be so good anymore.

I also want to give respect to joints like Trickster and The Projects (thanks to Sloane Leong for the note on this one) that are attempting new paradigms for showcasing art and and artists, and what appears to be creating a certain kind of space for networking (at least in the case of Trickster). At the same time, I cannot claim to be an expert on either one of these. But they do appear to have the intention of putting people and the medium before the almighty dollar, so I can support that. I dig that Trickster is creating an alternative within the mainstream gathering, and a lot of what they’re about overlaps with my thinking. What they’re doing represents a lot of what I’d hope to see in the future. (Fake Editor’s note: this paragraph was added. I’m too lazy to edit subsequent paragraphs around it).

But what if gatherings for lovers of comics were inherently different? What if they were grassroots, and driven by the fans themselves? I say this because I run a conference that is based on those principles, and it proves to be an incredibly powerful experience every time. I joke with a lot of people when I’m trying to explain my work that “Limmud is like Comic Con, but for Jewish things”. But then I started wondering…what if it went the other way around?

Here’s one simple example: check out Open Space Technology (there’s also a pretty good description on Wikipedia - mind you, there’s no actual technology involved). Anyone who has ever participated in an effectively-facilitated Open Space experience knows how positive it can be. There are entire conferences that come together without pre-set agendas and allow people to connect for days at a time using this technology. Now imagine if you gathered x number people with whom you’d like to discuss comics: friends, bloggers, creators who were not bound to a party line by their employers, cool retailers, etc…And what if you just had an afternoon (or a weekend, for that matter) of Open Space comics talk. There wouldn’t be agendas or selling (though everyone loves a good dollar bin to be sure), just an effectively facilitated means of people who love comics talking about exactly that instead of sitting on a panel while Dan Didio explains that Green Arrow is such an effective lover that he doesn’t need a vibrating arrow in his quiver in the New 52.

It’s pretty easy to imagine:

• One person wants to host a conversation about representations of race and gender in comics
• Someone else wants to talk about the best Jimmy Olsen stories
• I want to talk about Guy Gardner: Warrior because I always want to talk about that
• Someone else wants to talk best practices in inking and which tools to use
• Chris Sims wants to hold a discussion about that time that Batman threw a car battery at a guy

I’m also not just talking about Open Space. I know that there are models out there for the creation of truly engaging gatherings, and I’d love to see them applied to comics. It wouldn’t be about worshipping creators (who are as human as the rest of us), or being manipulated by publishers who couldn’t care less about us. It’s about this art form, this medium, that we love, once loved, want to love, and sometimes struggle to continue doing so, while surrounded by people who feel the same way, even if they don’t share the same preferences.

This is all very quick and dirty, and the Open Space is just one example of a whole range of techniques that I collect through my work to get people engaged with each other. But it’s the beginnings of what I feel could be a worthwhile vision for a gathering of comics lovers that empowers and energizes its participants rather than exhausting them, emptying their wallets and making them more cynical.

And hey: If you love cons, if you leave them feeling great and excited, then more power to you. And I also care about Artist’s Alley in that it provides revenue stream for those creators. But in terms of programming and design, I think there’s a lot more potential out there for us than waiting in lines for panels. And I suppose I’m not writing this for you, am I? I’m writing this for the people who would legitimately appreciate an alternative to what currently exists.

All of this said, if anyone would be interested in considering the possibilities for an Open Space Comic Con, I’d love to have a real conversation about it someday.

At the academy (Ida Crown), there were all kinds of kids, some more, some less observant,” Averick says. “Everyone there, whether or not they were observant, had an instinctive respect for him. They understood he represented something that was holy. There were kids who were not so interested in learning, but for him they would stand up. He really was a Talmid chachem (Torah scholar). He sort of radiated from high, but it was not something he demanded from people.

From Chain of Miracles, by Pauline Dubkin Yearwood

I just got this article in the mail from my dad, and it certainly took me right back to the teenage days. The quote above is from an article about Rabbi Meyer Juzint Z”L, an incredibly beloved teacher from my high school. It also perfectly captures how we all felt about him. Coming from a liberal Jewish family into an Orthodox high school, I fell into the category of “less observant” by a certain standard. Talmud study was a real challenge for me back then compared to my classmates who had grown up with it (real talk: still a challenge for me), so at times I was one of those kids who was less interested in learning. But we all loved Rebbe Juzint; and everyone stood up when he entered the room. It wasn’t out of a sense of formality and decorum; that was simply how much we all respected him.

I was lucky enough to go to his home with some friends on a Sunday morning or two to learn privately with him. It was considered a privilege, and I’ll hold it dearly with me forever. My sophomore or junior year, I was put into one of his classes and it felt like the honor of a lifetime, even though I struggled through the whole year. I was sort of a weird kid in high school (still am), and I sense that perhaps Rebbe Juzint didn’t entirely know what to make of me. But he taught me with the same quiet love that he brought to all of his students.

We did have our moments, though. A story:

While in many ways my high school wasn’t like most others, we still had seniors pulling pranks on an annual basis. The best one I ever saw was my sophomore year, when a bunch of guys filled the school with live chickens. They were running around a maze of benches in the atrium on the top floor, they were all over the place. I salute whoever was behind it to this day.

I was on my way to morning prayers in the auditorium when all of  sudden I heard Rebbe Juzint calling me from down the hall, “Dovid! Dovid! Come here! You have to see this!” I ran over to him, thinking that something was wrong, only to find him standing in front of what was usually the school’s trophy case. But there weren’t any trophies because the thing was filled with chickens.

“Chickens, Dovid! Look at the chickens!”

Rebbe Juzint was giggling hysterically at the whole thing, and I’d never seen anything like it from him. Laughing with this sacred man was beautiful as any moment I ever had at that school. I’d like to think that he was instinctively appealing to the oddball in me by calling me over to see the chickens.

His memory is nothing but a blessing for all of those who were lucky enough to learn with him. I’ll never forget that I got to laugh with him, too. Wherever he is, I hope he’s found the peace that he so richly deserved.

And to this day, I still don’t know the fate of the chickens.

I was 22 at the time, somewhat lacking the maturity to appreciate the gravity of the situation and probably too focused on my own transition out of college to process what was happening around me. Then again, maybe it was a coping mechanism. My mother and aunt felt the pain of having to sift through their respective childhoods and their parents lives, having to decide over and over what could or should be saved, and what must be sold through a cousin’s business. Meanwhile, I found myself shopping in a hybrid between a thrift shop and the world’s coolest museum.

There’s no blame to be laid, but as a kid I didn’t ask the right questions, and I suppose that my grandparents weren’t always the world’s biggest storytellers. Humble to a fault, my grandfather would only ever tell me that he was an architect. In truth, he was a Jewish communal professional, helping U.S. servicemen get kosher meals on holidays with the Jewish Welfare Board. At some point, he helped to design the interiors of JCC’s across the country. I didn’t know any of this until I went into the basement with mom and Linda, and by then it was too late to ask him about it.

My grandfather was also one hell of a natty dresser, and I ended up taking more than a few items of clothing with me from that house. There’s a linen shirt that I still wear every Passover that I’m convinced is infused with magic; I’ve spilled everything from red wine to apple cobbler on it and it still comes out clean every time. More than any standard Jewish ritual object, that shirt holds a spiritual importance for me that I still can’t quite define. When I wear it, I think of my grandfather praying on his own in my parents’ living room every morning as the sunlight washed over him, of sitting next to him at the synagogue as he passionately crooned the prayers with his almost comically deep voice. He was the Jewish role model to our family, and he remains so to this day. Every year as my father presides over high holiday services at his synagogue, he proudly wears the same tallit that my grandfather wore when he was a chaplain in WWII.

My grandfather never got to discover that I’d committed my career to serving in the Jewish community. While I wonder just what he’d make of this thing that I do called Limmud NY, I suspect that he would have enjoyed it quite a bit.

Out of everything that I found and saved, this is by far my favorite item. It’s an ashtray:

Here’s the back of the thing:

Just so we’re clear, this is an ashtray from a Bar Mitzvah party. Not quite the party favors that you find these days.

Now before we get to the next part of this story, you should know that I found this ashtray in the top drawer of the first piece of furniture that I encountered upon entering the house. So this ashtray could have hypothetically been sitting in the front hall of my grandparents’ home for just over forty years. No one knows for sure.

But here’s the thing: my grandparents were Anne and Murray Rosenberg. I have no idea who Roslyn and Irving Hershkopf were. (As an aside, my grandmother’s nickname for Murray was “Rosie”. She always told me it was because he had rosy cheeks, and for some reason, I always believed her. I’m pretty sure it’s because his last name was Rosenberg.)

No one will ever know the story behind that ashtray, but it does give us some clues about the broader Jewish cultural context of the time, at the very least in terms of the role of smoking and its accessories in Jewish lifecycle events 50 years ago. But in the ten years since I found that ashtray, I’ve developed a fascination with what we choose to save and what we discard, and the stories that are held within the flotsam and jetsam of our lives, Jewish or otherwise.

If I had saved the swag from every Jewish conference I’ve attended in my career and left it in the basement for my own grandchildren to find, what would they conclude about my life? That I loved totebags, t-shirts and water bottles? Or that I loved communal gathering spaces? Would it make any sense to them? I have no idea.

What I know is this: we all have little items like the ashtray that I’ve kept. Sometimes we find them after our loved ones have passed, and sometimes they’re passed onto us. Maybe your grandparents wanted to get rid of that tablecloth because it meant nothing to them, but then it came to mean everything to you. Maybe there’s a story attached to it that you never got to hear, or maybe it’s your favorite story of all.

Everyone’s got something that they found in Rosie’s basement, and I’m really interested in hearing about yours. A few weeks back, I developed a little proposal based on this idea, that someday something like this could have it’s own home. But for now, I just want to see if people have items and stories that they might be willing to share with me, and I’ll host them here.

If you want to play show and tell, you can contact me here.

UPDATE: I have no idea why I waited ten years to do this, but I finally decided to look up Allan Abravanel on google not long after posting this. As it happens, he’s currently a lawyer in D.C., and we’ve been emailing ever since. He may even send me a scan of his Bar Mitzvah picture. Since then, I’ve learned the following:

• Roslyn was apparently his mother’s first cousin.
• We continue to have no idea how or why the ashtray ended up with my grandparents.
• Allan Abravanvel happens to come from a really, really interesting family. In fact, there used to be an Abravanel family newsletter that gathered and shared the many stories of Abravanels throughout history.
• To those of my friends who read comics, the Abravanels appear to be the real-life equivalent to the Crogans.

There was the famous Rabbi Don Isaac Abravanel, whose Biblical commentary I studied in high school

Or…

Moshe ben Raphael Abravanel, born in 17th Century Salonika.  He moved to Istanbul, converted to Islam, and became Hayatizade Mustafa Efendi, a famous physician who is credited with introducing modern Western medical practices to the Ottoman Empire.  One source notes that he was appointed hekimbashi, or chief physician, to the Sultan.  One of his sons became a professor in a medrese, and two of his grandsons followed him as chief physicians to the Sultan, one of them rising to the position of sheyhulislam, head of the Islamic religious hierarchy in the Ottoman Empire.  To say nothing of his encounter with Sabbatai Sevi, the famous Jewish false messiah. (This was quoted directly from an email with Allan)

Allan also shared from this book:

A pirate named David Abrabanel, evidently from the same family as the famous Spanish rabbinic dynasty (which included Rabbi Isaac Abrabanel), joined British privateers after his family was butchered off the South American coast. He used the nom de guerre “Captain Davis” and commanded his own pirate vessel named The Jerusalem. According to at least one report, he was the person who discovered what is now called Easter Island.

So I’ve learned about Jewish pirates, famous rabbis and Muslim doctors in the space of a couple of days or so, simply by googling a name I found on an old ashtray from my grandparents’ house. For me, this has been an incredibly powerful lesson in the infinite connections to be found between people, stories to be told and learned, and the objects that connect us, unexpectedly or otherwise.

In terms of this project, I’ve had a few people already reach out to me to share some items and stories and so I’m collecting them until I can launch this as a tumblr site that I’ve already reserved. Again, if you have something to share, please do be in touch at the contact link earlier in the post.

 UPDATE #2: So Allan did some digging and we’ve pretty much figured out that there never was a “Roslyn and Irving Hershkopf” in the way that the ashtray listed. Our best guess is that my grandmother had the item produced for through a business that she was running back then and as an erroneous item, she ended up holding onto it…for a really long time.

That said, the unexpected connections continue. In researching the names on the ashtray, Allan ended up tracking down his second cousins in here in New York, who he hasn’t seen in 50 years. He also told me that the next time he comes to New York, he’s going to bring along his Bar Mitzvah album and show it to me. A quote from him that I think is quite beautiful:

My daughter Karen thinks the album harkens back to another era.  I think the album is full of ghosts — protective, not threatening — who continue to hover in my consciousness.

Now here’s the real kicker of this whole thing. His daughter Karen? She was at Limmud NY in 2011, the year I was the Programming Co-Chair!

I’m pretty sure that I officially win Jewish Geography.

I’m sure I’ll write about comics again someday (hahaha no I probably won’t until they make good ones again), but given my professional role in the Jewish community these days, I feel like I’m under some sort of obligation to say something profound about the fact that it’s Passover this week.

AND I HAVE SOMETHING FOR YOU MY FRIENDS!

This is actually my favorite Jewish holiday in terms of ritual. Irrespective of what it’s actually become in a commercial sense (seriously, God doesn’t say anything in the Torah to the effect of “hey, I hope you guys figure out how to make frozen pizza out of this), the notion of changing our lifestyles for a week can make for an interesting shift in perspective .

But I love the Seder most of all. It’s a night of storytelling, a meal combined with an infinitely adaptable open source curriculum, one that we’re empowered to continuously tweak so that our Story of liberation from Egypt then can be made relevant to our Story as both Jews and human beings today. It’s a time when we say “let all who are hungry come and eat,” and if we live that up to it’s truest form, we can feed whoever we want. As far as I’m concerned, the best Seder is one that includes people who do not consider themselves to be Jewish. Better than that is if they feel 100% welcome and comfortable, and even better if they can fully connect to the content of the learning at the meal.

I grew up at my father’s side as he led our family’s Seders for many years and it was one of my favorite things in the world. Every year, he searched for new and relevant content to bring to our experience of eating and celebrating together. When I was 27, I decided to stay here in New York and co-lead a Seder with some dear friends. It lived up to the standard that I listed above, and I was hooked. My parents were lovingly disappointed in their own way.

“Why don’t you come home for Passover anymore?”

“What were you two doing when you were my age?”

“We…oh, we were hosting Seders in our home for our friends.”

“Then it’s my turn. Y’all did a good job.”

I actually went back to Chicago to co-lead with my dad at a Seder last year, and it certainly was quite a wonderful time. The sharing and mixing of two different approaches led to a whole new kind of conversation, and I hope we can do it again someday. Even better: I look forward to hosting him in my own home in the not-too-distant future. But I’m back in Brooklyn this year, and getting ready to co-facilitate with a different friend. I can’t wait.

A couple years back, I did some sharing about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and I also offered a reflection exercise that can be used by anyone, irrespective of faith. Now I’m doing it again. You can use it for your Seder, or you can use it with your friends, depending on the situation. Totally up to you.

I call it The 21 Jump Street. If you’re smart, you’ll figure out why.

The only things you need are people, Post-It notes, pens/pencils and comfort with a writing exercise at your Seder.

The Context: At the Seder, we celebrate our ancestors liberation from slavery in Egypt. Putting aside the debate about the historicity of that particular narrative, it is an essential part of the Jewish Story. One of the most important pieces of the Seder is that we are asked to step into the shoes (sandals?) of our ancestors and view ourselves as if we were also slaves in Egypt. The challenge in our modern lives is that most of us cannot truly relate to this type of experience. We do, however recognize that we have brothers and sisters in this world whose history remains sadly to close to this experience, and we also recognize that there are those in this world who are in fact living as slaves. I’m glad to see that the conversation about fair labor and human trafficking is central to the Passover conversation in my community this year, and I look forward to the day when all people can only think of slavery as a sad memory as opposed to something that still exists in today’s world.

The purpose of this exercise is address the idea that we all have some version of personal bondage, something that holds us back from being the people that we would fully and truly like to become. (Let me add that I do not intend to diminish actual slavery with this, but it is meant to create a different type of relevant connection to the Seder).

The Exercise: Explain the notion of personal bondage, as I described it above. We all have the thing (or many things) in our lives, whatever it may be. Perhaps it’s an addiction to cigarettes or an overcommitment to our work lives over our personal lives. Everyone’s got something. Pass a Post-It note to everyone in your group, and ask each person to write that thing in a word or two onto their notes, and then to stick the notes to their foreheads. When everyone is done, have the group look around at what everyone has written.

Ask folks to raise their hands if they see at least one other note that they can relate to (hint: everyone will always raise their hands).

It’s a common experience. We all have those things that we wish we could change, that hold us back just a little bit. We want to be freed of them. It’s not always easy to do so, but at the Passover Seder, I like to create a moment where we symbolically try to let those things go. And sometimes, just sometimes, you can use that as an opportunity to start fresh from there.

Close the activity by placing a bowl in the center of the table, and asking each person to free themselves just for tonight by tearing up their Post-Its and placing them into the bowl. As an alternative, you can have people tear up the notes of others instead. Leave the bowl at the table as a reminder of those little struggles in our lives and the intention to move past them. Or pour wine on them or something. Totally up to you.

There you go: a thing for your Seder! Use it if you like.

Happy Passover!

Love and kisses,

Wolkin

This is sort of a thing, my friends.

And another thing! We will be co-teaching a session. This session will be called “I Love You, but You’re Wrong About Everything”. It’s basically going to be a father/son exploration of the fact that while both of us are deeply tired to Jewish life, have strong identities and a commitment to the community on a professional/personal level, we don’t have very much in common in terms of how we think of Judaism itself.

We thought about coming up with the content of the conversation on our own, but then we decided that it would be far more fun to crowdsource it. So we’re putting it to you, universe: what are the Jewish questions, ideas, conflicts and more that you would want to see my discuss with Carl, whether you’re coming to Limmud or not?

If you’ve got something, just throw it into the comments section and we’ll think it through!

(Note: some of you may think it would be funny to write something cute and snarky in the comments, something that you know we would never think about discussing. Please save everyone a couple minutes and refrain, since I’ll just remove it in moderation.)

• Detroit Metal City, volumes 1-8
• Bottomless Belly Button (cover price $29.99, light damage to the binding)
• Pride of Baghdad HC
• Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall HC
• Top 10: The Forty-Niners HC
• Hardware: The Man in the Machine TPB
• The Best American Comics, 2006
• Bone: The Dragonslayer HC
• Noble Causes Archives 1
• The Surrogates TPB
• Whiteout TPB
• Stormwatch: Final Orbit TPB
• Legion of Super-Heroes: The Beginning of Tomorrow TPB
• Sleeper: All False Moves TPB
• The Sentry TPB
• JSA: Justice Be Done TPB
• Batman: Broken City TPB
• Fight for Tomorrow TPB
• Hitman: Ace of Killers TPB
• Fear Agent Volume 1 TPB
• The Annotated Mantooth, signed by Matt Fraction
• Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume 1 TPB
• Stormwatch: Change of Die TPB
• Doktor Sleepless Volume 1 TPB
• The Tourist TPB
• The End League Volume 1 TPB
• The Exterminators Volumes 1-5
• The full run of Echo in trade
• Animal Man, Volumes 1-2
• Formerly Known as the Justice League TPB
• Frank Miller/Simon Bisley’s Bad Boy HC
• Hard Time: 50 to Life TPB
• Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits TPB
• Sandman, Volumes 1-3 TPB
• Spider-Man: Back in Black TPB
• Invincible Volume 12 TPB
• Transmetropolitan: Year of the Bastard TPB
• Ultimate Iron Man volume 1 TPB
• Stray Bullets Volume 1 TPB
• Seaguy TPB
• Crisis on Infinite Earths TPB
• Fables Volumes 1,2,6 TPB
• The Incredible Hercules: Smash of the Titans HC
• The Hood: Blood from Stones HC
• Catwoman “The Wild Ride” and “The Dark End of the Street” TPB
• Squadron Supreme TPB
• Persepolis Volume 1 HC

More than anything else, I’ll probably remember 2010 as the year when I sort of almost actually didn’t become a writer for the New York Times:

Of course I don’t write for the Times, but it’s a pretty incredible thing to find that something I wrote is being quoted at all, and by people that I respect. Discovering this a day before my 31st birthday was a nice touch, too. When I hit 30, I sort of asserted to all of my friends that I would start doing something related to comics in the following decade, to get to do a thing by 40. And while I’ve hardly won any Eisners (and I don’t really plan t0), it’s been one hell of a year. In March I finally got this here site going and not long after, I picked up my first ever paid writing gig at ComicsAlliance, at which point my life entered an endless stream of surreality as my favorite comics site become my employer and the people whose work I’ve been reading on the Internet for years turned into real people, and friends to boot. The whole thing has been incredibly exciting and humbling, and I’m totally grateful to new friends and anyone who has supported me on this stuff in the past year. I’m not doing a list of names, but you know who you are.

Thank you, twitter. You made it all possible. I feel weird about saying that, but it’s true.

Oh my god are you as bored reading this as I am writing it I don’t like doing this at all let’s talk about more interesting things than me like COMICS.

I don’t have a “Best of 2010″ list since I don’t really care about putting one out, but what I do have is a year of comics reading that includes stuff that didn’t just come out this year, and I’d be irresponsible to my own experience as a reader if I didn’t take the time to record at least some of it right up in here. I also have a Theory/Taxonomy that I will share. It is for the smiles. All in due time (next post), my friends.

I read a bunch of books this year that are worth remembering. First off is three different war comics.

Charley’s War

Charley’s War could easily be the most important comic that I’ve read all year, and this was most definitely a year of reading some war comics. There are two big things that really struck me about this comic. The first is that I came to realize that the only war comics worth reading are the ones that do anything but glorify war. There is always action, and combat is a necessary historical backdrop for the story, but what should lie at the heart of all of these stories is that war is always ridiculous, terrible. There may be justified wars, but there’s no good reason to suggest that warfare should ever be celebrated. Charley’s War does anything but. It’s a deeply layered takedown of World War I, from the industrial horrors of the war itself to the social inequities inherent in the prosecution of it. There was no honor in this war;  Pat Mills and Joe Colquohoun remind you of it every step of the way.

Oh yeah, what was the second thing that stuck me? Something that we should always remember about comics: simple presentation does not naturally imply simple content. Charley’s War is a very straightforward book, and without the appropriate historical context and understanding, you might be dumb enough to read it as the story of a guy in a war whose friends keep dying. Reading the collections with historical background, additional essays and commentary by the creators make the reading experience complete. Charley’s War is all kinds of historically accurate and this year I learned more than I ever have before about World War I simply by following the journey of one Charley Bourne through The War to End All Wars.

Blazing Combat

Blazing Combat blew my mind. This comic was so inherently anti-war that the army basically shut it down after four issues. The only thing this book has to say is that war is always terrible and people always die, and it attempted to say so while the U.S. was getting embroiled in the Vietman War. Most of the stories are written by Archie Goodwin, but are duties are handled by a whole mess of the greats, including John Severin, Gene Colan, Wally Wood and Alex Toth, Goddamn Alex Toth. This book is worth buying just for the 3-4 Toth stories. I wrote a bit about one of the pages in this book a few months back. You can check that out right here.

Johnny Hiro

I probably read this last year, but I read it again this year, so screw you. We all hit a point in our worthless salad days when we read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and we understood the whole magical realism thing and it made us feel thoughtful and cultured to have read 100 Years of Solitude and whatever except that as wonderful as it is, it hits so far from home. Fred Chao’s Johnny Hiro is magical realism for all of us, especially New Yorkers. He creates a city where everything seems possible, dinosaurs  roam the streets of Manhattan and if you want Michael Bloomberg to help you with something, all you have to do is call him on the phone. He’ll be there. Not counting last week and the blizzard and all that.

Johnny Hiro is one of the most relatable heroes that I’ve read in anything for a long time, probably because he’s nothing more than a guy who’s trying to get by and make his girlfriend happy in a city that seems committed to denying him the success that he dreams of. It’s pretty clear that whatever that success may be doesn’t truly matter, because he’s got Mayumi and she’s pretty much the best.

Other things that you’ll see in this book that seem perfectly natural on the streets of NYC: Giant robots, ninjas, Judge Judy and the cast of Night Court, samurai bathroom stall attacks. Do you need more convincing? This book is great. Pick it the hell up.

Blacksad

I’m one of those people who fully digs anthropomorphized animals, but I don’t dig it in the creepy way, which leaves me with very few outlets, but my limited options are made of pure quality. Blacksad is some classic hard-boiled noir business, reminiscent of the best detective fiction. The three stories in the hardcover I got my hands on deal with racism, communism, Hollywood dirt and The Bomb, and they’re all fantastic. This book also has some of the best art I’ve seen this year. I was gonna do a thing on one of the pages from this book as a “Perfect Pages” post, but then I realized that every page in this book is perfect. The key to a good anthropomorphic story for me is the facial expressions, the body language, matching the right species to the right personality. It’s all here. It’s not for creepers, it’s for people with taste.

Market Day

My favorite book of the year that didn’t involve ninjas, punching, superheroes or anything of the like. Market Day is a comics masterpiece, and a landmark work of Jewish storytelling. Anytime it comes up that I’m Jewish and I’m into comics, someone inevitably asks me if I’ve read Maus. My hope is that sometime in the very near future, people will default to asking me about Market Day, because this is the book they should be reading. I wrote a gushing ode to it over here.

Yeah, I don’t like Maus that much. I didn’t really like X-Force in the 90′s, but for some reason, that doesn’t bother anybody as much. Don’y ask me why.

King City/Won Ton Soup/Orc Stain

Before you bother reading any of this, check out what David Brothers has to say about King City here and here and here.

My favorite thing about fiction in general is the notion of creating universes. The best works of fiction for me, realistic or otherwise, do a really good job of creating a compelling universe for me to get into as quickly as possible. That’s easily my favorite thing about these comics from Graham and Stokoe: their worlds are fully-formed. They’ve got their own languages (these guys are boss at coining slang), cultures and unknown histories. They make me want to become an anthropologist just to investigate more about the societies big and small that they’ve invented. Graham’s King City is the most fascinating urban landscape you can possibly imagine, replete with sight gags and puns so good they make a lifelong pun hater into a lover (I HATE PUNS). And his characters, they float on through. That’s the best way I can describe it. Stokoe creates expansive worlds, filthy, messed up planets, and the best recipes that’ll never exist. I’m not done with Orc Stain yet, but the art is something else. I love the hell out of Won Ton Soup and I can’t get enough of the whole badass vagabond chef thing. I hope there’s more to come out of this.

I think what I love most about these two artists and whatever school it is they’re bringing to their work has such a unique attitude and personality to it. If there was ever a set of comics that I could liken to someone playing jazz, it would be these. I’m going to keep rereading them so until I’ve memorized every damn note.

Scalped

Probably the best ongoing that I’m still reading. Scalped is a book about brokenness: the most unfortunate victims of a broken system that failed them from the start, a proud heritage nearly broken by that same system, broken families, promises, dreams, and pretty much everything else. Jason Aaron, R.M. Guera and others have created something remarkable and lasting, a painful, heartbreaking crime drama that somehow manages to be infused with hope. The ongoing plot of this book is one thing, but the true gems of Scalped of the single issue stories about life on the res. Issue #35 is one of those, and it has one of the best pages I’ve seen all year. I won’t waste time getting into it; look at it for a few minutes and then ask yourself why the hell you’re not reading this book already. (Click to enlarge).

The Rise of Arsenal

I’m confident that I’ve said everything I can say about this wonderful book already. My internal monologue reviewed issues #2 and #3 right here and here, I did some jokey analysis of the series in general here, and I wrote it up for ComicsAlliance’s Worst Comics of 2010 list. And then, of course, there’s the sketchbook. My last parting gift to what was easily the most entertaining comic of 2010 is this, one more addition to the sketchbook: Arsenal with Bill the Cat by Nathan Schreiber:

Believe it or not, I’m actually not done writing about this. In my world, there are no dead horses to kick. Only dead cats to love. Wait and see….

Batman: Odyssey

There are many things that I could say about this comic, and I plan to down the line, but for now? This and only this:

Some fast ones:

The Bulletproof Coffin: If you’re not inside it, you’re in the wrong place.

Hellboy & B.P.R.D.: There’s no hype here, no PR machine, no press conferences, no big things happening at cons, no major events, pointless crossovers (Hellboy getting down with Beasts of Burden is anything but pointless), no claims that “nothing will ever be the same again!” even though they keep changing. It’s nothing more than people who are the best continuing to do what they do best.

Gotham Central: The best televised police drama that has never been on TV. And Batman.

Pluto: There are three books that I’ve read in my life that have caused me to have an intense physical reaction while reading them: Crime and Punishment, The World According to Garp, and now this. In the first two examples, the intensity happened during one very specific moment in each book. Pluto had eight volumes, and something gripped me like that while reading each and every one of them.

Superman: Grounded: Typo.

Detroit Metal City: It might be about a sweet singer-songwriter who parades around as an evil metal god, and on that level it’s all kinds of hilarious, but it’s really about that person inside all of us that we never let out and the brilliant things that might happen when we finally do.

Daytripper: The real South American magical realism. Ba and Moon made a thing of beauty, a stunningly gorgeous and heartfelt meditation on the meaning of life and family, and somehow managed not to be pretentious as hell while doing it.

Scott Pilgrim #6: Comics Internet Champion Laura Hudson says everything there is to say right here, and I won’t even attempt to match that. I will say this much: I picked up and read the full run of this comic over the course of this year, and the thing that I love most about this book is the way that Bryan Lee O’Malley draws us in with the cultural trappings of our childhoods only to teach us some really powerful lessons about growing up.

Franken-Castle: I wrote an ode to it right here not too long ago. I don’t even like the Punisher that much, but I ate this up like a 1950′s youngster at a badass monster movie double feature at the matinee. Rick Remender and Tony Moore know exactly what they’re doing (the other artists were great too, of course). Keep following these two. Don’t forget: Monster Punisher flying a dragon mounted with a gun and shooting evil samurai. Don’t ever forget this.

Phonogram: The Singles Club: Good enough to get me way into Brit-pop, and it’ll certainly do the same to you.

Thor: The Mighty Avenger: Go back, look at the facial expressions. That’s it. Marvel is crazy stupid if they don’t see the long-term business potential of releasing the whole thing. I gave it some love in ComicsAlliance’s best of 2010 list right here.

Peepo Choo: If you don’t get the joke, then you’re probably the butt of it.

Grandville: See under Blacksad. Similar brilliance, different flavor, equally delicious.

How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less: I did one hell of a long interview with Sarah Glidden about this book right here, and I’m prouder of that than just about anything I’ve written all year. I left myself and my politics out of the writing, of course. It was an intense and personal read for me, and I’ve been playing with a post here for a while using the backmatter of that interview. She makes that place beautiful, and it is, in its very unique way. But she brings a certain type of person’s certain type of struggle to life, and I hope people use it to start some very necessary conversations.

“Um, actually…you forgot Parker: The Outfit.”

No I didn’t forget it, idiotic imaginary commenter that I’ve fabricated in this post so I can hate you. Darwyn Cooke just created something so perfect that I’m terrified that Parker himself might come out of those pages and kick my ass if my writing isn’t good enough. Read Tucker Stone’s interview with Darwyn here. It’s an essential part of the experience.

_________________

One last thing.

I haven’t been writing for all that long and while I feel pretty good about where it’s gone so far, my voice isn’t there yet. I feel like a pubescent 14 year old whose voice is cracking but every so often he gets a glimpse at how he’ll sound someday (god, this is terrible imagery). I will claim that voice I’m dedicated to that and it’s a promise I’ve made to myself. I love doing this and I’m committed as hell to keep getting better at it. When it’s been good, it’s been a great time. At the very least, I want to be able to give you some healthy belly laughs. At the most? I look forward to finding out.

Hope you’ll stick around, I guess? Oh, and sorry about the weird formatting on the “war of the trenches” entry. Cant seem to fix that for some reason.

Read Sean Witzke. He’s the best.

I haven’t edited this yet.

Are you still here? Did you stick around for the hugs? Here you go:

]]> http://wolkin.com/2011/01/1524/a-year-end-thing/feed/ 2 http://wolkin.com/2010/12/1521/who-is-wolkin/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=who-is-wolkin http://wolkin.com/2010/12/1521/who-is-wolkin/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:16:50 +0000 Wolkin http://wolkin.com/?p=1521 Who is Wolkin? I’m not telling you right now. Maybe I’ll tell you later. Maybe not. Do you know already? Do you care? STAY TUNED.